A change of gravity

"What this WPA guy did was track down the ledgers with the accounts of the money Grey'd sunk into that place. It came to about nine hundred thousand dollars and this was at the turn of the century. Be eight or ten million today."

Thirty-five years later, two years into the Depression, Grey's heirs had found themselves too short of money to maintain the estate, and had been forced to put it up for sale. Lane had seen it as it was then.

"Still used to go and fish there. The fact the place was all neglected didn't mean the trout'd all packed up and gone away, or that Grey and his fine fancy friend's caught all of them before they faded away themselves. What'd always been there was still there; you could catch a nice fat two-or three-pound rainbow, or a good-sized brown down by the Ox Bow. The streams were still okay; just the place'd gone to hell."

Lane had not been exaggerating. The photographs that the auctioneer had commissioned in the mid-Thirties for use in the brochure to advertise the property to potential bidders far away without success, as it turned out were on display in the card-room of the Grey Hills clubhouse. The sepia-toned eight-by-ten glossies showed the rolling lawns overgrown; the gardens gone to seed. The two-by-fours that had tautly. framed the block-U-shaped chicken-wire enclosures at the ends of the two clay tennis courts had fallen down. Six deep slatted wooden lawn-chairs with arms broad enough to serve as trays stood bleached and rotten by the courts, four abandoned at odd angles along the sidelines of one, the others together near the westerly baseline of the second.

Merrion imagined their occupants in better days rising slowly with tennis sweaters draped over their shoulders, the men in long white flannel pants, the women in long white tennis dresses going away from the chairs and up across the lawn toward the great house, the windows lighted golden in the blue twilight of some early autumn Sunday evening, '28, or '29, the future growing dark and closing in around them, the carefree people innocent, unaware it was one of the last weekend gatherings they would have together there, a rich contented family, with wealthy handsome friends.

In the old photographs weeds had reclaimed the playing surfaces. The buildings still barely standing then were dilapidated, all their window-glass long since shot out, needing much more than paint. The mews off behind the northeast corner of the house, where the pro shop now stood, had burned in lightning-started fires in the spring of 1930.

They had never been rebuilt; in the pictures two charred vertical beams stood in the rubble. Most of the tiles a watercolor done by some Grey family guest showed them to have been azure had fallen into the vast swimming pool, exposing the white mastic that had dried on the cement underneath. The beams and the shingled roof of the four-room cabana and verandah lay collapsed on the edge of the apron on the southerly side. The house had tilted off at a slight angle to the east, its three massive chimneys leaning toward the center of its sagging rooftree, by then almost buckled. The barn, since demolished, in the photograph retained the double doors, large and small, up and down, each of them securely latched when Herbert Hoover was still in the White House, claiming to see better days just ahead for the nation. But the auctioneer's photographer had set up his view camera to take the picture from dead center at the front; Mount Wolf was clearly visible behind it through the gaps in its siding.

"The wonder was that all of it hadn't been torched, right to the ground," Lane said. "Only reason it wasn't was because by the time Grey's heirs sold it, they were just as down-and-out as everybody else.

Not worth envying and hating any more. Besides, hardly anyone still alive by then ever knew them. Few oldtimers who were still around who hated Jesse couldn't do much to hurt him; he was long and safely dead. Got himself thrown by a horse, I recall, before FDR came in. You could call Jesse lots of names, but you couldn't fault his timing, came to knowing when to clear out.

"Anyway," Larry Lane said, 'at that point taking pictures of it was a total waste of time, no matter if it was the WPA was throwing away taxpayers' money to make a book no one'd read or the auction house trying to see if they could scare up a buyer someplace in the world.

They couldn't. The whole shebang was worthless, likely to stay that way. We look back now at the Depression and we nod to each other and say how bad it must've been then; took a world-war-economy boom to get us out of it, ten, eleven years of hopelessness and then five, six more of being afraid no matter what the president said. But from here we can see that it come to an end. From there, the point of view of people living through it, out of work, no money to buy food, it looked different, like it'd never end.